All posts by CRM Evolution

By 2018, more than half of all consumers will use mobile first for all of their online activities, according to research from Gartner. As a marketing professional, mobile should be a way of life by now; to keep up with customer expectations, customer relationship management (CRM) technology needs to ensure access to valuable organizational customer data, anywhere, anytime, and on any device. This session explores how mobile CRM can take your organization to the next level, regardless of the platform you choose. It looks at how mobile systems are deployed across the leading CRM platforms and provides best practices for integrating CRM technology with marketing automation and customer analytics.

Drawing from research from his recent book, Silicon Collar—which looks at a century of automation and its impact on jobs—Mirchandani demonstrates, through a wide series of examples, how it is, in fact, customers, not workers or unions, who are often the road blocks to automation. In doing so, he highlights the importance of getting the perspective of customers as companies look to implement artificial intelligence, robotics, and other automation in their operations and customer-facing processes.

Join this session to hear the digital transformation story Microsoft is creating for its customers with Dynamics 365 which unites Microsoft’s CRM and ERP capabilities with its powerful productivity and business intelligence tools. Hear compelling customer stories and be the first to view fascinating new Forrester research around digital transformation.

A positive customer experience is critical to a company’s brand and, ultimately, its bottom line. With the proliferation of technology and devices, the customer has become smarter and more powerful. Customers now decide when and how they want to interact with brands, which has had a direct impact on the way companies sell to their customers. While macro trends such as social, mobile, cloud, big data and IoT are forging a new era of engagement, customers are ultimately becoming far more disruptive than the technology itself.

Salesforce’s VP and CTO for Customer Connection, Charlie Issacs, will address how companies of all sizes can create new business practices that leverage technology to strengthen customer relationships and accelerate sales and growth. Attendees will hear actionable takeaways on how to create a customer-centric business and long-lasting brand loyalty.

The traditional sales process is in a period of rapid disruption. With 24/7 internet connectivity, most buyers have a wealth of information at their fingertips before they ever contact a salesperson. It is no longer sufficient for salespeople to function merely as human conduits for product information. Salespeople need to evaluate where customers are in the buying cycle, provide customized solutions on-the-fly, and then step in and function as a knowledge broker while building rapport. This session provides an adaptive selling framework and identifies the five critical steps salespeople must master to be successful in this new era of salesmanship.

This highly interactive presentation will offer tips for embedding a “think like an owner” mentality into your customer service staff and explore other fundamental questions, like what customers want, how customer service can drive customer loyalty, and, the role of social media in customer service. Ultimately, you want customers to have positive interactions with your company and then share those experiences with their peers. Once that happens, you can win referrals by tapping into their influence as brand advocates.

Cloud-based CRM implementations are becoming more complex, more mission-critical, and more closely integrated with on-premises and other cloud properties than ever before. While the appetite for more complexity has grown, the tools, processes, and cultural mindset have not kept up. The result is that CRM in the cloud is facing the same threat that on-premises software implementations have faced for the past 20 years: an excessively high failure rate and a culture of mediocrity that favors getting the job done over getting it done right. This session focuses on how companies can eliminate failure and waste in CRM implementations and stop the cycle of mediocrity.

Most sales efforts are driven by the concept of a sales funnel—bring in enough prospects at the top and qualify and engage them in the middle, and ultimately some fraction of them will buy your product. The concept has guided sales meetings for decades—but now it’s on its way out. The traditional sales funnel assumed two things: information asymmetry and a consistent sales cycle, both of which are disappearing. Sales managers must rethink the pipeline. This session addresses how pipelines are changing, how to leverage your existing CRM tools to meet new pipeline challenges, and how to evaluate the potential benefits from sales force automation changes. Learn the five keys to ensuring successful change management.

Most B2B marketers are struggling to put ABM in practice. While web trends and studies indicate that the pace of adoption and investment in ABM is accelerating, 47% of marketers still don’t believe they have the skill necessary to be successful at it. ABM is still a fairly new concept, so marketers can’t draw on a lot of expertise or best practices just yet. This session covers the major steps in building an ABM strategy, which include segmenting accounts and look-alike accounts, using data tools regardless of budget, creating contextual experiences through website personalization, and best practices for creating content for ABM.

Customer Service and Marketing have historically been like two ships passing in the night. While both played an important role in organizational success, rarely are the disciplines ever aligned. This presentation will discuss the new role marketing must play in order for companies to move toward being truly customer centric. Case studies will be used to demonstrate the importance of marketings role in establishing consumer expectations across all touchpoints, how organizations should approach the design of consumer segmentation and personalization strategies, the role business intelligence and analytics plays and why financial modeling is vital to staying ahead of shifts in customer service demands.